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Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

How Lean Thinking Helps Hospitals

Summary

Mark Graban overviews the Lean methodology applied in healthcare using examples and lessons learned from leading hospitals around the world.

Bio

Mark Graban is an internationally-recognized expert in the field of "Lean Healthcare," as a consultant, author, keynote speaker, and blogger. In June 2011, Mark joined the software company KaiNexus as their "Chief Improvement Officer," to help further their mission of "making improvement easier" in healthcare organizations, while continuing his other consulting and speaking activities.

About the conference

SDEC is an annual conference hosted by Protegra where industry professionals share their own real-world experiences gained through delivering solutions.

Community comments

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Hi

I really liked your presentation describing several examples about improving healthcare processes. I was actually looking for two more keywords: continuous improvement and value delivery. According to my experience, lean is more likely related to processes than to institutes. A process is about delivering a value -> it can be lean from different points of view. Continuous improvement is about identifying more and more values in institute and additionally more and more ways to deliver a higher value. During this improvement some already lean processes have to be redesigned completely. That's normal. Sometimes a new goal is more important than an old value.

You mentioned it is important to have happy employees. That's right. They will be happy if they feel themselves important. Employees have to know exactly what kind of value delivery process they are participating in and what kind of value they are delivering. This is leaders' duty: they are motivating people by revealing different ways of delivering value. Managers' role is different: they should help employees to achieve a goal.

In healthcare the focus is on patients. For an ill patient the biggest value is to get healthy. This is the primary value and the institute should focus on delivering this value. By the way while the patient is under treatment usually additional values appear: how fast and expensive the treatment is, how much the patient is waiting for a doctor or for a nurse, the quality of the food, ...

Lean helps the hospitals by identifying the different value delivery processes and by showing ways how they can be improved. Unfortunately there is no general rule how a process can be improved. The improvement has to be adjusted to that process in that institute. That's why I think your presentation was really good because you presented problems and solutions. Thanks.